Author: harvardelr

The ocean is becoming more acidic worldwide as a result of increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (“CO2”) and other pollutants. This fundamental change is likely to have substantial ecological and economic consequences globally. In this Article, we provide a toolbox for understanding and addressing the drivers of ocean acidification. We begin with an overview of the relevant science, highlighting known causes of chemical change in the coastal ocean. Because of the difficulties associated with controlling diffuse atmospheric pollutants such as CO2, we then focus on controlling smaller-scale agents of acidification, discussing ten legal and policy tools that state government agencies can use to mitigate the problem. This bottom-up approach does not solve the global CO2 problem, but instead offers a more immediate means of addressing the challenges of a rapidly changing ocean. States have ample legal authority to address many of the causes of ocean acidification; what remains is to implement that authority to safeguard our iconic coastal resources.

Political and legal tools have emerged since the 1970s, and especially in the last two decades, that provide political and legal power to neighborhoods. However, these tools are often used in an ad hoc fashion, and there has been scant analysis of how these tools might work together effectively. This Article asserts that those locations in cities that evoke a “sense of place” are created not just with architectural or landscape design, but by the operation of neighborhood legal tools as well. This Article argues that cities consciously overlay the panoply of emergent neighborhood legal tools as a means of place-building. This approach is referred to in the Article as creation of a de facto “legal neighborhood.” This approach does not call for secession of neighborhoods from cities or for the wholesale privatization of public functions, as have others that argue for neighborhood empowerment. Rather, the Article asserts that the collective operation of these neighborhood tools is greater than the sum of their parts, providing a method for civic engagement at a level city-wide politicians feel comfortable serving, in which residents feel comfortable participating, and which is proven to assist the kind of place-making that makes densely settled areas attractive. These features of the neighborhood make understanding legal neighborhoods a necessary component to any effort to address the built environment’s social, political, and especially its environmental effects, such as climate change. The Article provides approaches for linking the neighborhood to city and regional affairs, and a history and theory of the concept of the neighborhood as an argument for the important role and function of neighborhoods in American life.

In recent years there have been suggestions that climate change might generate 200 million or more migrants by 2050. In response to these suggestions, and concerns that existing law and policy will be inadequate to deal with the expected displacement, there recently have been several proposals for new legally binding multilateral instruments specifically addressing climate migration.

This Article makes three contributions to the nascent literature on the legal and policy responses to migration induced by climate change.

First, it identifies the two principal gaps in existing law and policy that underpin to a significant extent the recent proposals for a new binding multilateral instrument, describing these gaps as the “rights” gap and the “funding” gap.

Second, this Article analyzes three of the leading proposals for a new binding multilateral instrument. It identifies the ways that these proposals would respond to the rights and funding gaps and emphasizes the proposals’ limitations.

Third, this Article emphasizes that addressing climate migration ultimately requires increasing the resilience of communities especially vulnerable to climate change. It then identifies ways to mitigate the effects of the rights and funding gaps by reducing existing vulnerabilities to climate change, without a new binding multilateral instrument. While a series of measures relying largely on existing legal and policy tools may seem less satisfying than proposals for a new binding multilateral instrument, these measures are more likely to address the concerns about human vulnerability to climate change that the proposals for new binding multilateral instruments have admirably highlighted.

When a landowner makes a charitable gift of a conservation easement to a nonprofit organization or government entity and elects to seek a federal tax deduction, both landowner and easement holder are subject to federal tax laws and regulations governing the creation, monitoring, amendment, and extinguishment of the easement. A nonprofit easement holder is subject to federal laws governing nonprofit operations. The nonprofit and government holders are also subject to state laws governing the operations of nonprofit organizations and the administration of charitable and other public assets on behalf of the public. All of these laws affect and restrict the ability of nonprofit and government holders to amend and terminate perpetual conservation easements. Contrary to representations made in When Perpetual Is Not Forever: The Challenge of Changing Conditions, Amendment, and Termination of Conservation Easements, 36 Harv. Envtl. L. Rev. 1 (2012), none of these laws can be ignored.

Coalition for Responsible Regulation v. EPA follows from and amplifies the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA. Both cases announce the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act — with Massachusetts v. EPA prodding a reticent EPA into regulation of greenhouse gases under the motor vehicle provision of the Act, and Coalition for Responsible Regulation v. EPA affirming both EPA’s obedience to Massachusetts v. EPA and the agency’s new willingness to extend greenhouse gas regulation to stationary sources. The cases are significant because they together stimulated and sustained the first controls on greenhouse gases in the United States, altering a status quo in which greenhouse gas emissions were free — not taxed or regulated or otherwise constrained.

Overall, Coalition for Responsible Regulation v. EPA is a win for the environment. Its effect is to preserve permitting requirements for stationary sources that emit greenhouse gases. It also supports and extends the Supreme Court’s recognition in Massachusetts v. EPA that EPA may regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. However, what the case reveals about the American legal system’s ability to respond to changes in the natural world is sobering. It exposes a system in need of revision: one in which lawmaking, designed to be measured, manages instead to be dawdling, and agencies and courts must summon all of their resources — prognostication, strategy, rhetorical finesse, and luck — to turn outdated statutes toward pressing threats. In this case, in an effort to provide some response to climate change and thus fulfill broader public mandates, both EPA and the D.C. Circuit held statutory language at arm’s length: EPA, by promulgating rules that “tailored” the clearest kind of statutory language — numbers; the court, by calling on standing doctrine to avoid facing — and thus having to overturn — EPA’s fast-and-loose interpretation.

These choices, which were essentially workarounds to avoid the application of straightforward statutory language, together succeeded in preserving greenhouse gas regulation, but not without risk and compromise to environmental positions. Whenever an agency departs from statutory language, it risks reversal. That risk is especially acute when the reviewing court is the D.C. Circuit and the reviewing panel includes David Tatel, who, in his capacity as a judge on the D.C. Circuit, has urged agency officials — if they are to satisfy the court and fulfill their role as responsible public servants — to “(1) [r]ead the statute; (2) read the statute; (3) read the statute!” The D.C. Circuit, for its part, preserved EPA’s workaround by doing a workaround itself, one that shrinks somewhat that cornerstone of environmental litigation: standing doctrine.

Part I of this comment puts Coalition for Responsible Regulation v. EPA in context by reviewing the history of greenhouse gas regulation under the Clean Air Act. Part II profiles the case itself. Parts III and IV use Coalition forResponsible Regulation v. EPA as a showcase for the nimble, risky choices required of agencies and courts as they use outdated statutory frameworks to respond to new environmental challenges. Thus, Part III shows EPA balancing the danger of taking a red pen to the Act, on the one hand, against the danger of overseeing a sprawling regulatory program, on the other. Part IV shows the D.C. Circuit preserving EPA’s approach to regulation of greenhouse gases at the cost of narrowing the doctrine of standing. The trade, as we will see in the details, is not terrible, but it is a compromise nevertheless.

The Supreme Court has historically maintained a complicated, tumultuous relationship with Clean Water Act cases. However, on March 21, 2012, the Court aligned in rare form to issue a unanimous, clear opinion in Sackett v. EPA. The decision establishes Administrative Procedure Act judicial review for Administrative Compliance Orders under the Clean Water Act. This Comment argues that while the decision changes the face of Clean Water Act enforcement law, it does so without affecting other administrative or environmental laws and with virtually no practical effect on Clean Water Act enforcement programs.